Building a user community

We are publicly funded, by a research grant. Against the odds, and against reasonable expectation, we have succeeded. However, this may be too late.

A growing number of people are starting to rely on our software. This should mean we get funds to maintain and extend it - but there is no guarantee of this.

When the project started there was a lot of money for "e-science", so we didn't realise that building a case for continuation needed to be central. We could have made usable deliveries earlier, and put more work into building a user community.

We now have less than 12 months funding less. In the absence of any guarantee of continuation, I am positively encouraging the developers to look for new jobs - and looking at my own options.